For 28 years I was a prominent Intuit Quicken – QuickBooks specialist. This includied 12 years as a QuickBooks insider, with frequent personal emails and fast responses from two Intuit CEOs and their top assistants. Intuit and NetSuite did much more than get me featured in Accounting Technology, Business Week and PC Magazine stories. Therefore, it is a big change for me to ask why should you use QuickBooks in a negative way.

I got 2007 Intuit ProSeries (TurboTax) Advisory Council members to ask Intuit to package QuickBooks, ProSeries, hosting and more. Intuit instead severly limited hosting for years of non-secret beta tests. Despite its own serious repeated reliability issues, Intuit then made hosting companies pay expensive security and reliability costs. It also makes them give it financial, security and customer data. By contract, it can use this data to compete (increase charges) and disclose it publicly. It also charges hosts $18,000 signup fees, $5,000 annual fees and $5/user/month. Why should you pay more and risk data disclosure to use QuickBooks hosting?

QuickBooks desktop rent is only $7.50 to $12.50 a month, with hosting, but hosting brings this $50 – $80+ a month. You then must still manually enter each error-prone bank and credit card transaction. Why should you use QuickBooks?

Xero is, by far, the fastest and easiest complete automatic accounting program. Unlike QuickBooks, Xero automatically downloads all bank and credit card entries every day, with total accuracy and the best safety, security and reliability (multiple redundant computers at multiple secure locations, professionally run and continuously backed up). Rules automate entry assigment to accounts. It is $12 to $32/month/unlimited users (with my no-obligation passed on Partner discount), or free if you use any of my very inexpensive closely-supervised international CPAs and bookkeepers.

That is why Xero use grew 120% a year, as QuickBooks desktop use shrinks. 70 million now use automatic accounting (many do not know they have it), up 50%+ this year, compared to 4.4 million now using QuickBooks. So why should you use QuickBooks? Why QuickBooks?

Please do not say it is for in-office security. All bank and credit card data is now online. Here are 15 reasons why QuickBooks is the worst place for your data. Some do not apply to online use. All apply to the QuickBooks desktop. So why should you use QuickBooks? Why QuickBooks?